Boxing and Brutality

In the two weeks since this blog began, lots of folks have shared their, uh, amazement that I’d love such a violent sport as boxing. So let’s start a discussion we can have between local events. I’ll go first:

“Boxing is just two people beating up on each other.”

Yes, well, it is that. But that’s like saying baseball is “just a bunch of grown men chasing a little ball.” The statement is an abstraction. Baseball and boxing, like lots of human interests, have no reality in the abstract. We don’t go to a movie and say: “That was silly; it was just images projected on a white screen,” or to the ballet, and say: “What a ripoff! Just a bunch of people prancing around in their underwear.” (Okay, in the interest of full disclosure, I have said that once or twice).

These things are metaphors, aren’t they. We suspend our disbelief so that we can be present to them, and engaged on a deeper level. Then, out come some primal emotions that find little expression anywhere else.

All sports have an element of violence in them, even if it’s the possibility of it. The risk of injury seems almost necessary for the metaphor to work. I don’t know why, but I’m sure it has something to do with DNA, our cave dwelling ancestors, hungry velociraptors, that sorta thing.

But unlike baseball, football, and yes – even hockey where the game breaks out between fights – boxing is quite direct in its violence. There’s nothing subtle about it.

As a result, boxing resonates – even more loudly than do other sports – with something deep in us. Despite its controversy in a world that expels 10-year-olds from school for drawing pictures of a water gun, the ring remains the place where humans meet and defeat fear. So fighters will always be heroes to us, American Samurai who do what we would never dare and somehow ennoble us in the process.

Life can indeed be like a boxing ring. Since getting out is unthinkable, both are places where standing up to “fight” is sometimes the only alternative. Both are less about conquering fear, than of not being ruled by it, less about winning than of not dishonoring ourselves by compromise (read: Human Growth Hormone), or the desire to sacrifice the higher good for safety. And, most of all, both are about the courage to get back up after life, whether in the form of a difficult period or a fist, knocks us down.

We may inveigh against boxing’s brutality and seeming irrelevance to civilized, modern life, but turn on The Fights and heads will instinctively turn in the direction of the blue TV screen light in the same way we peer at traffic accidents as we drive by, or why we have to put our tongues in the place where a tooth has just been extracted. We have, deep within, a primal curiosity about who we are beneath the thin veneer of polite society, of something in ourselves that is there just in case we need it.
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Oh, one more thang… About tonight’s Jermain Taylor – Kelly Pavlik re-match:
I love Jermain Taylor, I really do, but unless he takes out Pavlik early, he’ll get worn down by Kelly’s relentless pursuit and superior strength. And, of course, wherever Pavlik connects, he leaves a dent. I predict a near repeat of Taylor – Pavlik I. Pavlik will end it in Round 5.